Foto Friday: Rocket Rest Home

Niles was home with a cold for three days this week, hanging around the house, bugging me. So I couldn't get any scanning in; I'll have to post a picture we had scanned at camera store.

Rocket Garden, Kennedy Space Center, Nov. 2004

This is part of the rocket garden of the Kennedy Space Center. From left to right we have the Mercury-Atlas, the Redstone, and the Atlas-Agena. That Restone is probably a Mercury too, i.e., it was used in the Mercury program. The red spires on top of the Atlas and Redstone are escape towers (so you know they were from manned missions). The black cones beneath the towers are the actual space capsules, where the astronauts sat.

Naturally, these particular rockets were never launched; they were either space program spares, or military spares refurbished to sit in the garden. They might be even be replicas. See this site for more than you ever wanted to know (especially here and here.)

This is a time exposure, of course. I have a little tabletop tripod, about as high as my outstretched hand, that I usually carry around. I don't remember if I had it with me that day -- we were there several days, and by the end I was getting tired of lugging my enormous camera bag through security -- but I do remember I took this photo by resting my camera on top of a handy garbage can. Mmmm-mm! That's a good smell. There were also bees.

This is not too shabby a photo. Some in that set are out of focus. It's hard to focus at night while you're bent over double with your hair in the garbage and bees buzzing around.